ABSTRACT
Darwin’s account of the origin of species restored drama to the natural order by shifting the focus from lifeless specimens to the incessantly shifting balance of life in motion. Struggle, conflict and competition were the dynamics of his theory of natural selection, which portrayed the differences between species as relative and unstable, so that organic forms were always in a process of becoming: ‘Each formation, on this view, does not mark a new and complete act of creation, but only an occasional scene, taken almost at hazard, in a slowly changing drama.’1 The suggestion that there was something theatrical in the diversification of natural forms echoes Chambers’s habit of referring to ‘theatres of life’, but it may have been more than a casual rhetorical gesture.
